Mara Hoffman’s hippie chic look catches fire

Sunday

Jul 27, 2014 at 12:01 AM

NEW YORK — Mara Hoffman’s brand of Technicolor tribal hippie chic is a summertime pick-me-up if ever there was one.The New York designer best known for her swim and resort collections is lending her kaleidoscopic...

By Booth Moore

NEW YORK — Mara Hoffman’s brand of Technicolor tribal hippie chic is a summertime pick-me-up if ever there was one.

The New York designer best known for her swim and resort collections is lending her kaleidoscopic prints and rainbow warrior aesthetic to an ever-growing universe of products, including ready-to-wear, bridal gowns, kids clothing, iPhone cases, Pendleton towels, Havaianas flip-flops and a home collection for Anthropologie.

“It’s feel-good fashion,” says Stephanie Kennedy, a buyer for Revolve.com, which stocks the line. “While it’s always recognizable as Mara, the brand is evolving. People want more from her.”

It’s been 14 years since Hoffman, who grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., and graduated from Parsons School of Design, started making hand-dyed, one-of-a-kind clothing out of her apartment in New York City’s Curry Hill neighborhood. Soon after, she was discovered by “Sex and the City” costume designer Patricia Field when she was bringing some of her clothing to a consignment store to pay the bills. Field placed a $5,000 order, and Hoffman thought she had won the lottery. From there, she began selling her pieces store-to-store.

Hoffman launched her collection, then called Circle, during New York Fashion Week in 2000, staging a drum circle instead of a runway show. “It was really earthy,” she says during a visit to her New York showroom, which is decorated with a hippie chic tepee, giant dream catchers and Turkish carpets. “But it set the tone.”

As orders mounted, she found the hand work to be unsustainable. So she developed a new design focus beginning in spring 2006 — prints.

“I stretched silk across a wood frame and hand-painted big green waves,” she remembers of her first print. Those hand-painted prints evolved into computer-designed prints, and the trippy multicolored geometric shapes became a brand signature.

Swimwear was a natural progression in 2008 and, as it turned out, another smart business move. “Ready-to-wear is a hard, super-saturated business with a lot of talented people making clothes. Swim gave me an opportunity to say something that not a lot of people were saying yet,” Hoffman says.

Her playful bikinis and one-pieces, with sexy cutouts and strappy lacing details, and her poncho- and dashiki-style cover-ups put her on the style map in a bigger way than ever before.

When Jessica Simpson wanted to announce her weight loss to the world this spring, she posted a photo of herself on Instagram wearing Hoffman’s lace-up one-piece in a print named “cosmic fountain.” Vanessa Hudgens, Kourtney Kardashian and Ashley Tisdale are fans of the bikinis in prints such as “divine stone,” “astro dreamer” and “rays violet.”

Some women, Hoffman included, even wear the underwire bikini tops as bras.

“She has a great, eclectic sensibility with prints that pop,” says Sabra Krock, creative director of swim and resortwear retailer Everything But Water, which has been stocking Hoffman’s collection for two years.

“The combination of her psychedelic prints and colors, and her use of architectural elements on swimwear makes it a unique collection,” says Brooke Jaffe, operating vice president of fashion direction at Bloomingdale’s.